I recently picked up an unopened copy of the DVD set of all the MGM Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies and watched most of the first two, Tarzan the Ape Man and Tarzan and his Mate.
Very weird stuff. As someone who grew up with the Dell/Gold Key comics Tarzan (a weird mix of the Weissmuller Movie Tarzan and the Burroughs novels), I was entranced by the exotic locales (Africa itself, but especially things like the land of Pal-ul-don, with its surviving dinosaurs). The movies, which I saw occasionally, but can’t actually recall any of, were disappointing in the way they couldn’t show all of this, and concentrated on safaris and native attacks.
I later read all the Tarzan novels, most of them in one year. It was tough going after a while, because the damned things are so repetitive. It was like trying to live on a diet of cream puffs. At his best, Burroughs was astonishingly creative, and manages to play with some very interesting material. But a great writer he isn’t (I read Fritz Leiber’s novel Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, the first “official” Tarzan novel nit by Burroughs, and could see the difference immediately between a great writer of fantasy and a good one). His Africa is filled with pockets of forgotten or undiscovered by the outside world little specialties – A valley of Roman civilization, or Medieval knights, or ant men, or dinosaurs and australopithecines, or whatever. I’ve also re-read some of his earler books with a more critical eye, and Burroughs’ racism shows pretty clearly, but not in the way one would expect.
The movies are a whole different thing. The MGM series deliberately ejected the whole John Clayton mythos and just had Tarzan as an inexplicable white guy raised by apes. He lives in the “Mutia Escarpment”, a sort of plateau like the one in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World”, which maybe explains howcum he and his apes have escaped discovery so long. And he’s near the fabled “Elephant’s Graveyard”, which makes it a draw for greedy White Hunters. (Neither a “Mutia Escarpment” nor as hoary a notion as the Elephant’s Graveyard" is in any of Burroughs’ books). And,of course, instead of being a literate autodidact who speaks multiple languages (Burroughs’ Tarzan learned French before he could speak English), Weissmuller’s Tarzan can barely speak one, in his “Me Tarzan, you Jane” style (although he never actually says that line). Jane, by the way, is Jane Parker, not Jane Porter, and would be in several movie series afterwards.
Burroughs knew that they’d be doing this before he signed on with MGM, but he did anyway. The movie series was profitable. But he hated what they did to his creation.
The movies are kinda dumb and pretty damned racist. But I was impressed with some of the effects (and sorely disappointed in others). At least they really did try to show you Tarzan and Jan interacting with African beasts. And there’s the nude swim in the second film, which really does appear to be nude, although it’s not O’Sullian swimming. And I notice it’s the woman only who’s nude – Tarzan gets to keep his loincloth. Although I suspect that’s more a concession to biology than to sexism (Male parts would be visible and obvious proof of nudity, while with a woman they can claim she was wearing a light-colored body suit and have plausible deniability.) The nude swim imitated one in a film a year earlier called “Bird of Paradise”, and Annette Kellermann had reportedly been swimming nude in one of her silent movies. Within a year, though, the new Hayes code made them cut the sequence.
) but why is she in the movie? And the actor who plays DJ is just fun to watch. Lewis Pullman, son of Bill is also in it. I can see him doing funny stuff like his dad, but this isn’t it.